“For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.”

In Kosovo, the U.S. has chosen a course of action that escalates atrocities and violence.

Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

The United States and Britain loved him. He was supported until the last minute.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded.

It could be – and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don’t like it – that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.

The invasion of Iraq, particularly, gave a big shot in the arm to the jihadi extremists.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I didn’t pay my taxes for years.

There’s very little dislike of Americans in the world, shown by repeated polls, and the dissatisfaction – that is, the hatred and the anger.

The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn’t pay his protection money.

I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster;’ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

The Republican Party has become overwhelmingly so extreme that it’s hardly a traditional political party anymore.

I am still bullied occasionally. However, none of my current bullies really exist. They’re all in my head. Be your own best friend instead of your worst enemy.

The only way out of the current crisis is to amend the Constitution.

I am swept beneath your current – it pulls me in, and I don’t even try to swim.

Once the current of awareness of the self is set afoot, it becomes everlasting and continuous by intensification.

I’d like to think that throughout my career whatever my current record is has 110% of my best.

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

If inflation-adjusted interest rates decline in a given country, its currency is likely to decline.